


Sadness is for Toy Soldiers

by lucifers_left_earlobe



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-18
Updated: 2013-09-18
Packaged: 2017-12-26 22:18:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/970926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucifers_left_earlobe/pseuds/lucifers_left_earlobe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Sherlock jumped off of St. Bart's, John is faced with the depression of losing his best friend. He meets a woman, Mary Morstan, who helps him recover from that loss. Life strikes and John finds himself alone again and he embarks on an adventure around the globe. In turn, he discovers somethings about himself he never knew or understood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sadness is for Toy Soldiers

All those months ago, on that cloudy London afternoon, Sherlock had jumped. John watched helplessly as the life drained out of his best friend, as the light faded out of his eyes. He lost his senses for a moment or two, absorbing the shock of losing his flat mate. When he sprinted over to the slowly accumulating crowd surrounding the now lifeless man, he saw the blood, felt the absence of his pulse.

Now it’s September and he’s got Mary, but he’s still not over it. Sherlock had been to him what air was to lungs. He was necessary for function. John had cried for weeks following his suicide, only to be comforted by stealing one of his scarves to wear with him everywhere he went. He’d met Mary in June, and she was lovely. Her patience for her grief was god-like. She supported him wholly while acknowledging the fact that his nostalgia for walking down certain streets or his refusal to work at St. Bart’s (even though they’ve repeatedly offered him well-paying jobs) was ludicrously unhealthy.

They’d gotten married the following May; John realizing he loved her attitude, her ferocity, her loving inner layers. She offered him smiles throughout the ceremony, her beautiful blue-jeans eyes twinkling as they said their ‘I do’s in the little church just a kilometre from Baker Street. They went on their honeymoon to Bermuda, spending a full two weeks under the hot tropical sun and making love under the stars. Still, though, even marriage couldn’t erase that cold hole consuming John’s very being.

 In the spring, two years later, Mary was diagnosed with brain cancer. She hadn’t taken the news lying down. The tears did betray her fear, though she stormed on, continuing to work right up until she had her first stroke. The neurologists said that her mind would revert to the state it had been in when she was a child, which is if she woke up from the coma. Luckily or unluckily, Mary did recover from the first stroke, marginally, and she was allowed to leave the hospital for all except weekly check-ups and her chemotherapy. Fortunately and surprisingly, her mind was still in a similar state to what it had been previously. She could communicate with John at expanses crossing the oceans. John would read her books; he started with Treasure Island and made his way through the Harry Potter series.   

It was fall when Mary’s condition worsened. She had developed in intermittent tremor in her hands, indicating that the cancer was growing. They went back to see the neurologists and found that it had engulfed nearly a third of her brain; she was given less than a month. Mary wasn’t allowed to leave the hospital after that, and John remained by her side.

Three days before Christmas at 11:30 in the morning, Mary died. It was due to a combination of factors, though the doctor had insisted that it was caused by several heart attacks in the course of a week. John had been more fervent to fight the young lady’s opinion, arguing that she had been administering the wrong medications, too much or too little of the medications, that if she’d just stayed by his wife’s side, Mary would still be alive. She tried her best to console him, offering him a blanket and a cuppa when his shoulders slumped and the first sobs heaved from his chest. He sat curled up in the chair beside Mary’s vacated bed all night. At some point in the early hours of the morning, a woman had come in and offered him some food. He denied it, after all, with his best friend gone, now his wife, what did he have to live for?

Mary was buried on New Year’s Eve. Only close family came, except for Mycroft Holmes and Greg Lestrade. They’d come prepared and each of them cuffed John’s shoulder, Mycroft even pressed a cold flask into his hand. John turned it over in his hand and read the inscription at the bottom. _‘To my loving brother, Sherlock. Be a dear and wait until you’re eighteen to start drinking hard liquor. -Mycroft’_. John stuffed it into his jacket and offered them each a quick nod before looking back to his dead wife, turning his shoulder on his best friend’s older brother. When only John and Harry remain at the pyre, Harry told John that he should go on a vacation, travel the world or something. John takes her request to heart and by the time he gets home to the old flat, he’s made his decision.

It’s been three years since Sherlock jumped from St. Bart’s. John has traveled from Siberia to the upper Yukon. He was invited on an expedition to Antarctica, and gladly accepted it. Within six months of Mary’s death, John had made the journey around the world, visiting every country that would take him. He’s sorted out a couple things in those last few months; he figures that Mary will probably be the last person he could’ve loved, and that he’d never have a friend like Sherlock ever again. He also finds faults within himself: his stubbornness, his general bigheaded cockiness, and to top it all off, his inability to be completely honest with himself. Now that he has a more objective view to the situation, John knows that he never only loved Sherlock as a friend. There was a twisted obsession buried deep within him, a sort of infatuation at the man’s genius. And he supposes that Sherlock would’ve noticed this; he once correctly identified the woman John was seeing based only on a small paper cut on his thumb. Still, though, it’s a new addition to the stockpile of things he wished he told his best friend when he had the chance. 

A month before his return to London, John meets a man in Peru who he quite fancies. He calls himself Billy, though John believes it to be a pseudonym going by the way he fidgets nervously when telling John obvious lies about his life. Despite the dishonesty however, the two hit it off becoming fast friends. Billy is oddly reminiscent of Sherlock in a way that doesn’t repel John, but attracts him to the younger man.

Conspicuously, Billy holds mutual feelings and their relationship evolves into a more romantic one, what with the occasional sex and labeling each other as ‘boyfriends’. It’s the most comfortable John’s been in a while. After their midsummer soiree ends when Billy returns to his home in Italy, John decides to head back to London earlier than planned, booking a flight just as Billy walks out of their shared rented condo.

Mrs. Hudson meets him at Heathrow international, dressed to the nines in a spanky blue dress with light violet pumps. She greets him with a warm embrace and kisses his cheek, telling him he’d lost too much weight and that she’s going to prepare him a good English supper. John agrees, grinning from ear to ear because he couldn’t have been happier to see his doting landlady. They jump into a cab and head to 221B. It’s John’s homecoming.

They arrive shortly, though John notes Mrs. Hudson grows more and more anxious with each passing kilometre. She appears to be almost giddy, which is understandable given that he, whom she refers to as her ‘lovely halfway son’, is home, but there is something buried beneath that excitement. From all of his time with Sherlock, he’s picked up a few tricks, one of them being the basic identifiers for terrified nervousness. Her hands are slightly shaking from the exertion of controlling herself, her eyes are slightly pinched in the corners, and her breath is coming in short, shallow huffs. John keeps his mouth shut, not wanting to startle the woman from revealing whatever it is she is hiding.    

Mrs. Hudson climbs out first, adjusting her hair until she’s pleased with how it curls out at the ends. John tips the cabbie and lets her pull him out by the hand, leading him up those all too familiar stairs. Soon, he’s going to be lonely again. Soon, he’s going to be reminded of love lost and love never experienced. Soon, he’s going to end up drunk on Mrs. Hudson’s sofa for not the first time. 

She unlocks the door and they climb up the stairs to his flat, which has been organized save for Sherlock’s various paraphernalia. Even the violin is out, resting on John’s old chair. The overcoat is neatly draped over one of the armrests. Everything’s as should be at 221B; everything, that is, except for the obvious dead elephant in the room. 

Then, John stops. A sudden realization hits him like a blow to the head. He never got the overcoat back; Mycroft took it to channel some of his guilt and act as though Sherlock never died. And the violin: it had been placed in storage because John could no longer look at it without breaking out into choked sobs. Mary had taken it to Mrs. Hudson to lock away with the rest of Sherlock’s things. There are footsteps walking towards the two of them, a soft _pit pat pit_. And two naked feet loom in John’s vision. No, this is completely impossible.

And he looks up, to see the face of a man long missed, a man long mourned. And he can’t prevent his arm from pulling back and slamming into that familiar face. He can’t stop himself from pulling back again and again, swinging with the same urgency, stopping only when Mrs. Hudson shrieks at him to stop. He feels the tears on his cheeks before he knows he’s crying. Loud, angry sobs burst from his chest, a voice similar to his yelling “Sherlock, Sherlock, you fucking bastard.”

He stops himself and gathers his bearings. Sherlock isn’t dead. Sherlock hasn’t been dead for all of those years. Sherlock let him feel all of this guilt alone, letting him wallow away in it until he became a shell of his former glory. Sherlock, whose softly smiling face is looking down at him with a split lip and the beginnings of a black eye.

“Hello, John.” Sherlock says, that deep baritone voice sending a whole new wave of pathetic spasms throughout John’s body. He steps forward, tentatively, and wraps his lanky arms around John, encompassing him in warmth. Sherlock had always found hugging trivial; maybe he also feels guilt for the past three years, just as he should. That being said, John can’t stop his arms from circling around the taller man’s waist and leaning his forehead into his shoulder. Sherlock pulls away after a moment, though he doesn’t lessen his hold on John’s shoulders. He glances to Mrs. Hudson and says, “Thanks for bringing him here. Really.” And he shoots her an actual smile. Sherlock never smiles; he’s as monotonous as Spock for God’s sake. 

He turns his multicolored eyes back on John, and he can see love in them. He expects the kiss before it actually happens, and just as Sherlock leans in John leaps, catching his lips in his own, desperate to feel what he so longed for. Sherlock’s lips are just as soft as he imagined, with just a trace of something interesting on them. They break after a moment and Sherlock cradles John’s face in his hands. 

“I love you. I never got to tell you, John, and I’m so, so sorry.” Sherlock murmurs. His cheeks have taken on a lovely pinkish tone, making him look more human than John had ever witnessed. He feels the dopey smile stretch across his face from ear to ear, not caring that he probably looks like a love struck idiot.

“I love you too, you idiot.” John replies. And he pulls Sherlock toward that chair, that same familiar chair from all of those years ago, to demonstrate just how much he loves his detective.  

**Author's Note:**

> For clarification purposes, Billy is a character in the Sherlock Holmes series, just not on the BBC show. He's in the books and he is Sherlock's assistant when it comes to detective work in some of the later stories.


End file.
